The term "medical sharps" generally is defined as medical instruments having a sharp cutting edge or a sharp point. In the medical environment, sharps comprise hypodermic needles, syringes, scalpel blades, and the like. Other medical wastes, including chemotherapy and pathological wastes comprise surgical tubing, washcloths, surgical gloves, cultures of infectious agents, and the like. After use, medical sharps and other medical wastes must be safely collected and disposed of without creating a hazard for the hospital personnel, patients, or maintenance personnel.
Presently, the hospital protocol is to use and immediately dispose of these medical wastes in receptacles, such as plastic, wall-mounted receptacles or in large receptors having an open top wall, otherwise known as "kick buckets". Typically the receptacles are placed in strategic locations throughout the hospital or other medical treatment facility, such as on the wall in the patient's rooms, in the hall outside the patient's room, in treatment rooms, operating rooms, and emergency rooms so as to be available for receiving the medical wastes immediately and conveniently after use by the nurse, physician, or other medical personnel. Additionally, the kick buckets are generally placed in operating rooms and emergency rooms for receiving large volumes of various types of medical wastes from authorized medical personnel only. The receptacles must be suitably sized and shaped to receive the anticipated amount of medical waste over a period of time, depending on the protocol of the medical facility, and the receptacles must easily receive yet securely and safely retain the medical waste so as to avoid presenting a hazard to children or to disoriented patients or to curious visitors.
After these receptacles are filled with medical wastes they are collected for disposal, usually for burning in an incinerator. The collection procedure usually requires relatively unskilled personnel to move about the hospital with a plastic bag or other relatively large container and to place the filled receptacles in the bag, and to replace the used receptacles with new empty receptacles, for example by dismounting the used plastic receptacles from their wall brackets and mounting the new receptacles in the wall brackets. After replacement and collection of the medical waste receptacles, the collected receptacles are securely packaged in a larger container such as a plastic bag or cardboard box and the bag or box is carried to a burn facility.
During the containment and collection procedure of medical wastes, there is the hazard that the medical waste materials will contaminate the personnel who are handling or are exposed to the wastes. Experience demonstrates that accidents caused by the medical waste materials through skin scratch or puncture and other exposure are occasional causes of injury to personnel and such accidents are a considerable expense to hospitals and insurance companies.
For example, when the used receptacles that are filled with medical wastes are being removed from their holders or being transported, the needle of a syringe can protrude from or escape from its individual receptacle and scratch or puncture the personnel handling the receptacle.
Therefore, it is highly desirable that the use-and-dispose method provides for safe containment and collection of the medical sharps and other wastes within the hospital environment by providing a collector which is puncture resistant and leak resistant.
Another problem can be created during disposal of the medical wastes. The usual method of disposal is incineration, whereby the medical wastes are converted into ash for delivery to a landfill, etc. The disposal systems for the medical wastes range from on-site incinerators to contract disposal services which transport the medical wastes to off-site burn facilities. Generally, the treatment plants incinerate the collectors and the medical wastes contained in the collectors and then bury the residue of the burned medical wastes and collectors in a landfill. Most of the known prior art medical waste disposal collectors are composed of plastics and when incinerated can yield a partially pyrolized plastic residue, which is essentially a tar ash. This type of ash is non-biodegradable.
An incineration technique is especially advantageous for disintegrating contaminated sharps and other pathological wastes, because incineration has the ability to convert the contaminated substances into a noncontaminated ash. However, when certain materials such as plastics of a syringe are burned, ashes from the incineration of these materials can become a tar ash or residue which when buried in a landfill, is non-biodegradable waste. Although the ashes of plastic syringes and some other types of plastic wastes will be delivered to landfills, it is highly desirable to avoid the use of plastic collectors for these wastes, because when plastic collectors are burned they can emit toxic gases to the atmosphere and create even more non-biodegradable ash, which is an undesirable additive to a landfill.
Thus, it would be advantageous to provide a disposable collector system for collecting and disposing of medical sharps and other medical wastes that is safe and efficient, biodegradable, and is simple to handle, and which can be incinerated without the evolution of any substantial toxic gases and which when burned aids in rendering the wastes. It also would be desirable to fabricate the collector of a combustible material that yields substantially only biodegradable ash upon incineration and to adjust the mass of the collector with respect to the anticipated mass of the collected wastes so as to control the ratio of the resulting biodegradable ash of the collector with respect to the non-biodegradable ash of the waste, when burned.